Now this Pastime is not meant to be a history lesson as much as a Happy Birthday greeting. December 18th Bradley County turns 181 years old. Happy Birthday to Bradley County! Getting the technical out of the way, on December 18, 1840, Bradley County was formed from the much larger Union County on pre-drawn, pre-territorial maps.…
A Pastime of my past surfaces each Christmas. It is more about an event and yet the culinary treat that came my way for simply moving a few card tables and pieces of furniture around, makes me write this after a half century of memories. Of my many duties as a Printer’s Devil at the…
Here is a Pastime when there was a Santa House in downtown Warren. The week after Thanksgiving, the Warren Chamber of Commerce, under the tutelage of James Ernest, who would later be the Bradley County Judge (1965-68 and again, 1975-76) quickly constructed a small white-frame building on the corner of Cypress and Main in Warren.…
This is a time of the year for good, time-tested and tasty recipes. I know this is a column about Pastime memories, but these are some recipes that will fill that bill. So read on my friends. Each really good recipe is one that is passed down from grandparent to parents and parent to children.…
A man of many talents, one intense love – for the City of Warren, Ark. This is a sad Pastime, sorrowful only in that a good man has died and left his indelible marks on the red brick streets of Warren. My mentor, the late Robert L. (Bob) Newton Jr., who could write such tributes…
This is a Pastime of reading pleasure and memories of pages filled by books of famous Americans. There was a small, but compact collection of little orange/red backed books found on a shelf under the east window of the children’s section in the old Warren Public Library. That collection still fills my memories – even…
The Arkansas State Fair just closed this past weekend with record crowds and a revived and crowded midway and stock barns filled with exhibits. This Pastime is about a long yellow school bus ride to and from the Capitol City to witness the Arkansas State Fair in about 1967-68 with Mr. John Briggs at the…
This Pastime is another installment in the ladies-ready-to-wear shops that once proliferated along Main Street in downtown Warren. And a big Airstream trailer parked in the alleyway behind Main. The alley ran from Cypress to Church. The shiny metal Airstream trailer was indeed, in its day, one of the snazziest travel trailers ever produced in…
It’s that time – a Pastime that comes around every October when most regular sports take a “back seat” at least temporarily to the Major League World Series. Each fall, years ago, if you could ‘sit still’ and “listen,” Wayne’s around such baseball lovers as Paul Whitaker, Jimmy Russell, Wayne Wisener, Hugh Allen Jones, Tommy…
A recent column about Mary Lou Martin’s fantastic chili dogs at Lumberjack football games got me thinking and somewhat challenged by the younger generation discussing the merits between Wayne’s Confectionary and The Corral. Wasn’t Wayne’s and The Corral about the same, one younger generation questioner probed? No. I quickly stated. The two restaurants were not…
As the cool evening nights of October draws near and Lumberjack football heats up in this modern high-scoring, take-no-prisoner style of football that now permeates Warren; all I can think about on the cool, fall evenings at a high school football game are Mary Lou Martin’s signature Chili Hotdogs. Years ago, I went back for…
The stories told along the red-brick streets of Warren are many, most known are of acts of kindnesses, personal achievement and civic goodness. This story has a mix of all three and more involving family. Back in the summer of 1951, the Warren Lions Club, led by Mack Graham, Hal Gibbs and other notable Lions,…
Recent deaths of two fine ladies reminded me of a very unique ladies apparel store – The Town Shop – which is now a Pastime of local finery absent from the Warren Business District. As I looked into the history of the shop’s owners and those who worked in this small, but important shop, perhaps…
With the start of Lumberjack football comes that unique salty scented memory of freshly popped popcorn. Just inside the southeast gate at old O. O. Axley Field, on the home stand side, is where the scent of this Pastime memory begins and I can smell it every time I step inside any football stadium. That…
Back in the day when “white boards,” and “computer screens” were the sci-fi subject of the educational and classroom future, according to the Weekly Reader, there was the chalkboard and eraser duo found in every classroom. And what a duo they were. It was the mass communication vehicle for learning most every subject. How many…
Just inside the front east door of the double entrance to Wayne’s Confectionary was a small 6 x 8 wooden framed blackboard mounted on the wall. It was perhaps one of the most important scoreboards in Warren’s history. A community scoreboard if there ever was one. I know all you children of electronics, computers, cell…
After last week’s Pastime about the weekly “punch card” drawing at the Mad Butcher, several readers asked me about a forerunner of the 1930s and 1940s called: “Bank Night.” The Bank Night promotion was a unique and loyalty driven jackpot conceived and run by the Wharton family – the owners of the motion picture theaters…
By MAYLON T. RICE Special to the Saline River Chronicle It is August. The longest month of the year which is a prequel to the shortest part of the year. The tomatoes are all picked. Most of the hay is out of the field and on the farm. Football and band practices have yet to…
